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The text editor you use can dramatically affect how you work and how well. If you use one of the editors that come with DOS or Windows (Edlin, Edit, Notepad), you are probably cheating yourself. There are many, many much more powerful editors for both DOS and Windows, and many are available as low-cost shareware products. Although I've tried many text editors over the years, the one I keep coming back to is The SemWare Editor (TSE for short).
TSE is a character-mode beast that runs under plain DOS or in a DOS box under any version of Windows. (It also runs under OS/2, if anyone still cares.) I'll discuss version 2.5 here; a new version (2.6) that provides long filename and huge memory support under Win95/NT is also available. There is also a "junior" version with reduced capabilities. Demos of all versions are available from the company's Web site.
WHAT'S SO GOOD ABOUT TSE?
I like TSE for three reasons-it is small, it is fast, and it is ultra-configurable. The basic executable weighs in at about 144K. (The junior version is about half that.) In this day of cheap gigabyte drives, size may seem a moot point, but it's not really. For one, smaller size translates to faster load times. For another, its small size makes TSE easily portable. I've written here in the past about the "emergency" floppy I keep handy, particularly when visiting client sites. In addition to critical DOS programs like FDISK, FORMAT, and XCOPY, that floppy also contains my collection of indispensable utilities, including TSE.
TSE is fast. It loads fast, and it runs fast....